Woodland walks

 A warm summer day a few years back the Sant Nicolau River in Auguëstortes National Park - ready to cool off?

Cumulus

 

Cumulus

 

Or stratocumulus I can’t …

The way they seem just

To hang there unmoving

 

White and gray in a bright blue sky

 

Then the distant mountains bluish

The fields a shift of green then

Autumnal yellows toned oranges

Move your gaze back up

Life's renewals

 From a photo taken some years ago in Viladrau

 

Buncrana revisited

 This photo is from a morning trip we took to Buncrana, Ireland on August 9 2019. Some of the landscape we saw on our walk along the river path. Buncrana is in Donegal, on the Inishowen peninsula. The high temperatures in and around Barcelona today make me yearn not only for the the views but also, obviously, for cooler weather. 

The water is Lough Swilly, the town 23 kilometers northwest of Derry, 43 kilometers north of Letterkenny. Hopefully we'll get back there again soon. And with temperaztures down worldwide.

Dalloway Day 2023 correction

 

Woolf and Eliot

 Clarifying briefly, my observation yesterday that discussing good and bad writing takes us to more complex questions will, I’m sure, seem simplistic. Obviously, a large part of literary studies and other disciplines for that matter are “about” such complexities. The essay by T. S. Eliot I mentioned in fact implies some of these matters in terms of whether or not the critic/poet “of our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.” Virginia Woolf—and a great many people along with her and with Eliot—was asking herself some of the same questions. By 1927, when To the Lighthouse was published, these two Anglo-Modernist writers had developed rather different answers. However a longer commentary on this will have to wait as I am currently outside Barcelona and unable to consult the source books needed to do it proper justice. 

 

 

Dalloway Day 2023

 

I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.

 

More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,

 

One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.

 

And when we start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer. But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile one. Happy Dalloway Day!

three words

 

three words

 

sun hammers my

craniocervical junction          takes

a mallet to say out                  of here

all the while the                      rain

forest is going while while while

Kitchen repñairs

 

Kitchen repairs

 

Try to take it like a vac—time

elsewhere while the builders

undo past cooking oil foils, our

faux marble counter and a

toaster’s antique failings.

 

Time to score a point, dream away.

Elsewhere, you know, have

a think, gild stuff. Purr.

I see a ridge

 

I see a ridge

 

Markedly in the usual sense.

Over the window sill,

out across nextdoor’s roofing,

on across the road,

the fields, then town.

I see a ridge

then the town proper a

definite split reversed maybe.

But there imagining alignment.

Different times of the day.

Closure.

FormContent

 Or perhaps ContentForm.... In any case, a recent experiment:

In the rain

 

Enlighten-

Ment crayon-

Hale

 

There that

Blue horse

Again

 

So sky-flighted

In the rain

Traveling

 I'll be taking a trip for a few days & offline. Thanks for looking in & I hope some new material comes with our travels.

Ahmad Jamal

 News first thing this morning of the death of Ahmad Jamal. Such a very great individual and musician. Montse and I bought his album "Pittsburgh" in that honeymoon style trip we took to New York City in 1990 or 1991. I think you'd really enjoy listening to that if you can find it, which I'm sure you can. Try to hear his music, that special use he makes of sound/silence. Very wonderful, very true rhythmically.......

visit (work in progress)

 

visit

 house set way back

a few cattle flying the lawn

 

there is that lien

shocking some party goers

 

a great deal more

would still fit the lawn

 

graze glue and

the blue of the sky

Update

 

In relation to technical problems I’ve set up a provisional Twitter account. At the moment the account is purely bare bones and I will be changing the name some time in April. As I posted previously, Twitter Help/Support has been notified of the tech problems. At present I am reading but not sending tweets.

Toward Spring

 Happy Saint Patrick's Day ! On the way to Spring. New reading includes  Michel de Montaigne's essay "On the power of the imagination." Inspiring lots of thoughts on the German concept of Stimmung, meaning mood, in English. Perhaps this is a kind of poetic shifting of gears after my recent reading in Vincent van Gogh's letters. His favorite color apparently was yellow, an interesting one when it comes to mixing paint. Somewhat differently, moods can be mixed, But then much in human creation seems to depend on adding and subtracting. All the while, choosing........ Toward Spring !

Granite

Closing in on a large stone, in search, I suppose, of abstraction......

Vincent Van Gogh's writing

 Continuing to  marvel over Vincent Van Gogh's descriptions of color in his paintings. As here, in an 1888 letter to his sister, Wil: "Right at the back, black cypresses against low white cottages with orange roofs--and a delicate green-blue strip of sky.... [N]ot one of the flowers has been properly drawn ... [and] they are only small dabs of color, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, but the impression of all those colors next to one another is there--in the painting as in nature...." Painting with words! His writing brings out a lot about his theory of art, obviously.

Turkey-Syria Earthquake Aid

 It's never easy to know which organizartions can help most. On Facebook I've shared one emergency aid site. Hoping to help as we can.

Updates

 As indicated in my previous post LinkedIn has been renewed. Twitter info was also to be revised but it seems this will have to wait until their security allows me to access my account. I've made them aware of the problem. It might be related to the information published on Wire magazine, link below. 

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-leak-200-million-user-email-addresses/

Updates

 My LinkedIn profile has been updated. I've added some information to the About section and replaced references in the Publications section which was previously lost. Thanks to all for looking in !

grasping

 

grasping

 

past the big oleander bush

backing off the tiles onto the lawn

staring at the railing

staring at the terrazzo decking of the porch

through the spaces between the balusters

between the top rail and the bottom one if you

prefer to look at it that way the way the

birds had gone silent

silence the air

traffic on the highway

about a kilometre away bikes

then the brush decorator’s brush

natural bristle

ancient the bristles nicked into at the toe

or torn half-torn away

remnants of paint (water base)

on the ferrule and

on the handle